If you're referring to their separate section with all apps (offering at least three possible sorting arrangements), and only putting those you need at hand on your home screens - that's fine too, I see their point.
But 4x5 icons on a home screen (and 3x3 in folders, as J.A. said), that's just plain waste of luxurious screen real-estate.
I've gotten used to 6x6 layout on my tweaked iPad's home-screens (plus 6 x infinite within folders), and it's really efficient. As I said, those wide-apart icons should be configurable within Accessibility Options (but then again, it's just how I see it - I also don't like those "trendy" websites where you need to either step 10 meters away from your display to read everything, or pres CTRL and Minus three times to reduce the size of fonts and photos
).